The Times Magazine 51hen Klaartje Quirijns received
a phone call saying she’d finally
been awarded funding she’d
been chasing for years for a
documentary – working title,
Your Mum and Dad – her
reaction wasn’t delight, but
dismay. “Normally, I’m really
happy to get money to make
a film,” she says. “But in this
case I remember so well feeling, ‘Oh, no!’ ”
Her dread was because Quirijns, 54, was
planning to make a film that dredged up her
parents’ long-buried secrets. “All my films
arise from the same question: ‘What are the
deceptive worlds we don’t get to see?’ This
was a painful, silent wound that had lingered
a long time under the surface. I was worried
about my mother and how she’d react to me
opening it up.”
So anxious was Dutch-born Quirijns that
it took her another three years to pluck up
courage to interview her parents about the
tragedy that overthrew their young lives and
altered them ineradicably. This was the death
in 1965 of her eldest sister, Saskia, aged 5.
It happened on a winter’s day when
both parents were out, leaving Saskia with
babysitters. She wandered onto a frozen pond,
the ice broke and she fell in. Quirijns’ father,
Kees, as she’s always called him, returned to
find a crowd of around 60 people gathered.
“They could have saved her,” Kees, now
87, tells his daughter on camera. He glances
at the scars on his hands, from when he broke
the ice himself. Saskia’s body was floating,
buoyed by her shiny black jacket. “I thought
she was just unconscious. She didn’t look pale
or grey; she had colour in her face.” He pulled
her out and gave the tiny corpse the kiss of
life, but without success. “I could not believe
that she was dead. I still can’t.”
Kees’ face is etched in agony, but he can
describe the incident and pull out a photo of
Saskia, a cheeky-faced child who’d now be
in her sixties. “I hadn’t known the details and
it made me really emotional. It still makesme emotional,” Quirijns says. But when she
turned the attention to her mother, now 83,
who was 25 and pregnant with Quirijns’ older
sister at the time of the tragedy, she initially
refused even to utter Saskia’s name.
When Quirijns tries to get her to talk, her
lips quiver, eyes dart agitatedly and a tear rolls
down her cheek as she firmly shakes her head.
Only later, in a heartbreaking conversation,
does she tell Quirijns how, for nearly 60 years,
she’d never spoken to anyone about her grief.
“I was paralysed,” she says. “There’s so much
sadness, disbelief, that she died,” Quirijns
says. When her mother saw Saskia’s body
in hospital, one of her cuts was still bleeding.
“That was so traumatic for her.
“I felt horrible doing it; it felt so cruel to
basically force my mother to talk about it,”
she continues. “But when I was sitting there,
trying to have a conversation with my mother,
I was also sitting there as a film-maker. Having
a device between us helped, because I didn’t
see the reality – I saw it as a scene in a frame.
Without a camera, I don’t know if I could
have done it. It gave me distance.”
Quirijns says her aim in making the film
was to explore the question, “What are the
wounds among an apparently successful and
normal Dutch family?” Certainly, entering her
flat in Belsize Park, north London, you have
the impression of a pretty perfect life. The
living room’s tastefully furnished with black
wooden floorboards and fabulous art on the
walls, including one black-and-white portrait
of her and her daughters, now 18 and 21,
taken by Dutch film-maker Anton Corbijn, the
subject of her 2012 documentary, Inside Out.
Quirijns is tall and slim with extraordinary
bone structure. “I was asked to be a model
when I was young,” she says – not boasting
but in the context of a conversation. “But
I am far too impatient to do that job.”Indeed, Quirijns is an empathetic, warm
but also adventurous character – the reasons
for which are clear once you watch Your Mum
and Dad. The film, whose title comes from
Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse (“They f***
you up, your mum and dad”), was first
conceived more than 20 years ago, when- living in New York with her Dutch lawyer
partner and pregnant with her oldest child - she’d started a film about therapy, recording
people’s sessions with psychologists.
“In New York, therapy is like going to the
gym – everyone does it. I wanted to know
what goes on beneath people’s deceptive
surfaces.” She began filming three people. “But
then I thought it was not interesting enough.
I was attracted to more dramatic, bigger stories.”
While heavily pregnant with her second
child, she made a film about an Albanian-
American roofer smuggling American guns
into Kosovo to arm the Kosovo Liberation
Army. “It was about how easy it is to start
your own army – you just buy old weapons
in the US, very high-calibre rifles you can
shoot helicopters down with,” she says.
“The therapy always was in the
background, but I never felt I’d found the
right angle on it.”
But then, in 2012, when the family had
relocated to London, Quirijns was found to
have pre-cancerous cells in her breast, which
were removed after three operations. “I felt a
new urgency to look into my own family.”
She remembered the words of New York-
based clinical psychologist Kirkland Vaughans,
whose session with her friend Michael
Moskovitz – who had a wretched relationship
with his mother, a Holocaust survivor – also
features in the film. “There is no such thing as
just this individualised unit; this unit we call
self is made up of portions of everyone who
has meant anything to us as we develop.”
W
‘I COULD NOT BELIEVE THAT SHE WAS DEAD,’ SAYS HER
FATHER, KEES, HIS FACE ETCHED IN AGONY. ‘I STILL CAN’T’
From left: Quirijns’ sister, Saskia, who
died at the age of five; Quirijns with her
father, Kees; Quirijns and both parentsCOURTESY OF KLAARTJE QUIRIJNS